Re: The managerial merry-go-round

Mark Hughes to Stoke sound like a disappointingly sensible appointment. A modification of the style of play to something marginally more akin to football, rather than the radical change Martinez (for example) would have represented.

QPR aside, he's an effective manager.

Effective perhaps, but his football is often dreadfully negative and he usually gets his teams playing very 'dirty'.

I wouldn't be over the moon if I were a Stoke fan

The inside of a Halex Three-Star table-tennis ball smells much like you'd expect it to

Re: The managerial merry-go-round

I suspect that most of the times clubs do this nowadays, it actually means f*ck all.

If I see a model whereby someone other than the 'head coach' chooses the players to buy (with their input) and then they just have to work with whatever they are given, then it will ring true. But it just seems like the job-title du jour at the moment

The inside of a Halex Three-Star table-tennis ball smells much like you'd expect it to

Arnold said he was shocked by the attitude of The Blades after being interviewed during a video conference in Sydney recently. "I walked out of that meeting with the club's board and football director Dave Bassett, and said 'Wow'."It just blew me away," the former Socceroo said. "Being one of the bigger lower league clubs, I was expecting a lot more in terms of how they wanted to develop as a club on the field.

"But they just didn't seem interested when I was talking about playing a short passing game and taking the football another level up. It was about smashing the ball long and working on set pieces . . . it was prehistoric stuff. That's not the way to develop a football team."

The inside of a Halex Three-Star table-tennis ball smells much like you'd expect it to